The title How to Have Sex might suggest a raucous, cheeky teen sex comedy, somewhere between American Pie, The Inbetweeners and a Carry On movie. Instead, this is an achingly sensitive and honest drama about sex, booze, consent, friendship, the painful precipice of adulthood, and the secret history of one messy weekend. Written and directed by Molly Manning Walker, it’s the latest in a recent string of excellent, heartfelt directorial debuts by a new generation of British female filmmakers, including Charlotte Regan’s Scrapper, Georgia Oakley’s Blue Jean, and most famously, Charlotte Wells’ gorgeous, melancholy Aftersun, which earned an Oscar nomination for All of Us Strangers co-star Paul Mescal.
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Like Aftersun, How to Have Sex locates its drama in the strange, suspended reality of a cheap package vacation on the Mediterranean: a world of flimsy hotel rooms, idle beach days, noisy pool parties, and karaoke in neon-lit boozing taverns. Both films have an affectionate eye for this traditional escape for working-class Brits, while being frank about its ugly side.
But where Wells’ film is a memory piece, dreamily exploring the inner lives of an 11-year-old girl and her very young, kind, but lost dad in the late 1990s, Manning Walker is up to something much more precise and contemporary. With a patient, compassionate, but penetrating gaze, How to Have Sex maps out the dangerous, murky territory of teenage sexuality and friendships.
Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Skye (Lara Peake), and Em (Enva Lewis) are three 16-year-old girls, cutting loose at the low-rent
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Paul Mescal